My problem:
I'm looking for a way to represent a person's name and address as an encoded id. The id should contain only alpha-numeric characters, be collision-proof, and be represented in a smallest number of characters possible. My first thought was to simply use a cryptographic hash function like MD5 or SHA1, but this seems like overkill (security isn't important - doesn't need to be one-way) and I'd prefer to find something that would produce a shorter id. Does anyone know of an existing algorithm that fits this problem?
In other words, what is the best way to implement the following function so that the return value is the same consistently for the same input, collisions are unlikely, and ids are less than 20 characters?
>>> make_fake_id(fname = 'Oscar', lname = 'Grouch', stnum = '1', stname = 'Sesame', zip = '12345')
N1743123734
Application Context (for those that are interested):
This will be used for a record linkage app. Given an input name and address we search a very large database for the best match and return the database id and other data (how we do this is not important here). If there isn't a match I need to generate this psuedo/generated/derived id from the search input (entity's name and address data). Every search record should result in an output record with either a real (the actual database id resulting from a match/link) or this generated psuedo/generated/derived id. The psuedo id will be prefixed with a character (e.g. N) to differentiate it from a real id.
I know you said no to MD5 and SHA1, but I think you should consider them anyway. As well as being well studied hashing algorithms, the length gives you more protection against possible collisions. No hash is collision-proof, but the cryptographic ones generally are less collision-prone than something you couuld come up with yourself.
Use a cryptographic hash for its collision resistance, not its other qualities
Use as many bytes from the hash as you want (truncate)
convert to alpha-numeric characters
You can also truncate the alpha-numeric string instead of the hash
An easy way to do this: hash the data, encode in base64, remove all non-alpha-numeric characters, truncate.
N_HASH_CHARS = 11
import hashlib, re
def digest(name, address):
hash = hashlib.md5(name + "|" + address).digest().encode("base64")
alnum_hash = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9]', "", hash)
return alnum_hash[:N_HASH_CHARS]
How many alpha-numeric characters should you keep? Each character gives you around 5.95 bits of entropy (log(62,2)). 11 characters give you 65.5 bits of entropy, which should be enough to avoid a collision for the first 2**32.7 users (about 7 billion).
A good solution is somewhat dependent on your application. Do you know how many users and what the set of all users is? If you provide more details you would get better help.
I agree with the other poster suggesting serial numbers. OTOH, if you really, really really want to do something else:
Create a SHA1 hash from the data, and store it in a table with a serial number field.
Then, when you get the data, calculate the hash, look it up on the table, get the serial, and that's your id. If it's not on the table, insert it.
I wonder whether you intend to "assign" these ids to the users? If so, I would expect your users to hate anything that you propose; who would want a user id of "AAAAA01"?
So, if these ids are visible to the user, then you should just let them pick what they like and check them for uniqueness (easy). If they are not visible to the user (e.g., internal primary key), then just generate them sequentially using an appropriate technique such as an Oracle Sequence or SQL Server AutoNumber (also easy).
If these ids are an attempt to detect a user that is registering more than once, then I would agree that you should consider a cryptographic hash followed by a full comparison of the registration data (name, address, etc.). However, to be usable, you will need to translate the data into a canonical form (standardized letter case, whitespace, canonical street address, etc.) before computing the hash or making the comparison. Otherwise, you will mismatch based on trivial differences.
EDIT: Now that I understand the problem space better based on your edits, I think that it is highly unlikely that your algorithm (so far) will catch most matches. Beyond my suggestion to canonicalize the inputs, I recommend that you consider an approach that results in a ranked list of a handful of possible matches (to be resolved by a human if possible) rather than an all-or-nothing attempt at a single match. In other words, I recommend a search approach rather than a lookup approach.
Is that feasible in your situation?
Well, if there's more than one person at the same address with the same name, you're toast here, (w/o adding code to detect this and add a discriminator of some kind).
but assuming that issue is not, then the street address and zip code portion of the full addresss is sufficient to guaranteee uniqueness there, so adding enough data from the name should take care of the issue...
Do you have access to a database, or other persistence mechanism, where you could generate and maintain key values for each address? Then keep the address and individual entities in two keyed dictionary structures, where the key is autogenerated for each new distinct address, person encountered... and then use the autogenerated alpha-numeric key...
You could use AAAAA01 for first person at first address,
AAAAA02 for second person at first address,
AAAAB07 for the seventh resident at the second adresss, etc.
If you donlt have any way to generate and maintain these entity-Key mappings then you need to use the full street address/Zip and fullNAme, or a hash value of the same, although the Hash value approach has a smnall chance of generating duplicates...
Related
I understood the process to shorten the URL with base 62 at How do I create a URL shortener?.
Steps given are
Think of an alphabet we want to use. In your case, that's [a-zA-Z0-9]. It contains 62 letters.
Take an auto-generated, unique numerical key (the auto-incremented id of a MySQL table for example).
For this example, I will use 12510 (125 with a base of 10).
Now you have to convert 12510 to X62 (base 62)
My question is why not just create unique numerical key and return it ? What is the advantage of concerting numerical key > Base 62 > then Finally some alphanumeric number ?
Is it because final alphanumeric number will be much smaller than unique numerical key ?
Yes. The idea is to make it short and usable in a URL. A number in base 62 will use fewer characters than the same number in base 10. Notice also that URL shorteners use short hosts, such as g.co.
I can see you understand that, yes, a number written in base 62 takes less characters than a number in base 10 just like a number in base 10 takes less characters than a number in base 2 (e.g. 0101 is 3 characters longer than just '5').
So, I'll answer specifically "Why".
Sometimes a link is shortened to be more visually pleasing. A company worried about their public perception likely doesn't want their links to look like an error code due to how long they are so they resort to shortening. That's why some url shortening services allow you to add your own "vanity url" which customizes the domain name, so that a link can be shortened and branded.
Other times a link is shortened to minimize character count when working with constraints, like Twitter. For example, at my company we shortened the links in our automated Twilio messages because SMS messages that contain more than 160 characters are technically 2 concatenated messages so it is more expensive to send.
And finally if the link is being shared through a medium that cannot be directly clicked on (e.g. verbally, on paper), making it shorter makes it much easier to type into an address bar manually. (Imagine trying to type the url to this SO question when someone is reading it to you.) I assume this is also at least partially why the base used for these links usually stop at around 62. If you start including other arbitrary characters to higher the base and consequentially make the link marginally shorter, it'll become harder to communicate, read and type. ("domain.name/5omeC0d3" vs "domian.name/🈲}♠"
My question is theoretical,
I'm trying to make a design for a mapreduce example in Big data processing.
The case which I have requires a pair of keys to be mapped to a pair of values.
for example if we have below text:
"Bachelors in Engineering has experience of 5 years"
I am trying to count the words Engineering & Experience in a way where I would have a value for each word separately.
So my key would be (Engineering,Experience) and my value would be (1,1) as per the above given text example.
Note that there is a relationship between both key values in my homework, therefore I want them both in one set of a key-value to determine if both keys are mentioned in one text file, or only one key is mentioned, or none is mentioned.
Please let me know if above case is possible to do in map-reduce of big data or not..
Having a string key of "(Engineering,Experience)" is no different than just having a String of one of those words.
If you want to have some more custom type, then you will want to subclass the Writable and maybe the WritableComparable interfaces.
Simlarly, for the value, you could put the entire tuple as Text and parse it later, or you can create your own Writable subclass that can store two integers.
Thanks for the Answer, but I figured I could use "Engineering Experience" as a string for the key.
I need a 6 character alphanumeric ID for use in my rails app, which will be presented to users of the system and must be unique among all the object instances in my system. I don't expect more than a few thousand object instances, so 6 characters is far more than I really need.
At this point I'm using the UUIDTools gem in my Rails app to generate a uuid. Which of the UUIDTools generation methods should I use, and which end of the resulting uuid should I take the 6 characters from, to guarantee uniqueness?
for example, if I generate ef1cf087-95c9-4868-bd95-cea950a52b58, would I want to use ef1cf0 from the front of it, or a52b58 from the back end?
... as a side note / question: am i going about this wrong? is there a better way?
No way. UUID is considered unique because it is very long and it is practically impossible to generate same UUIDs. If you trim it to 6 chars then you drammatically increase possiblility of duplicate. You have to use either incrementing id or full UUID.
Only deterministic generation (id(x + 1) = id(x) + 1) can guarantee uniqueness. UUID doesn't guarantee it and 6 chars guarantee it even less.
Other option is to create ID generation service, it will have single method getNewId and will keep knowledge that will be enought to provide unique ids. (Simplest case - counter)
When you say that incrementing the ID isn't an option, is that because you don't want users to see the scheme you're using, or because the generation must be stateless (i.e., you can't keep track of all IDs you've generated)?
If it's the former, then you can generate an ID, check to see if you've already used it, and if so, generate another new ID. (Seems pretty obvious so sorry if I'm on the wrong track.) You could do something like this:
while id = rand(2**256).to_s(36)[0..5]
break unless Ids.exists?(id)
end
where Ids.exists?(id) is the does-this-already-exist method.
I'm trying to generate UUIDs with the same style as bit.ly urls like:
http://bit [dot] ly/aUekJP
or cloudapp ones:
http://cl [dot] ly/1hVU
which are even smaller
how can I do it?
I'm now using UUID gem for ruby but I'm not sure if it's possible to limitate the length and get something like this.
I am currently using this:
UUID.generate.split("-")[0] => b9386070
But I would like to have even smaller and knowing that it will be unique.
Any help would be pretty much appreciated :)
edit note: replaced dot letters with [dot] for workaround of banned short link
You are confusing two different things here. A UUID is a universally unique identifier. It has a very high probability of being unique even if millions of them were being created all over the world at the same time. It is generally displayed as a 36 digit string. You can not chop off the first 8 characters and expect it to be unique.
Bitly, tinyurl et-al store links and generate a short code to represent that link. They do not reconstruct the URL from the code they look it up in a data-store and return the corresponding URL. These are not UUIDS.
Without knowing your application it is hard to advise on what method you should use, however you could store whatever you are pointing at in a data-store with a numeric key and then rebase the key to base32 using the 10 digits and 22 lowercase letters, perhaps avoiding the obvious typo problems like 'o' 'i' 'l' etc
EDIT
On further investigation there is a Ruby base32 gem available that implements Douglas Crockford's Base 32 implementation
A 5 character Base32 string can represent over 33 million integers and a 6 digit string over a billion.
If you are working with numbers, you can use the built in ruby methods
6175601989.to_s(30)
=> "8e45ttj"
to go back
"8e45ttj".to_i(30)
=>6175601989
So you don't have to store anything, you can always decode an incoming short_code.
This works ok for proof of concept, but you aren't able to avoid ambiguous characters like: 1lji0o. If you are just looking to use the code to obfuscate database record IDs, this will work fine. In general, short codes are supposed to be easy to remember and transfer from one medium to another, like reading it on someone's presentation slide, or hearing it over the phone. If you need to avoid characters that are hard to read or hard to 'hear', you might need to switch to a process where you generate an acceptable code, and store it.
I found this to be short and reliable:
def create_uuid(prefix=nil)
time = (Time.now.to_f * 10_000_000).to_i
jitter = rand(10_000_000)
key = "#{jitter}#{time}".to_i.to_s(36)
[prefix, key].compact.join('_')
end
This spits out unique keys that look like this: '3qaishe3gpp07w2m'
Reduce the 'jitter' size to reduce the key size.
Caveat:
This is not guaranteed unique (use SecureRandom.uuid for that), but it is highly reliable:
10_000_000.times.map {create_uuid}.uniq.length == 10_000_000
The only way to guarantee uniqueness is to keep a global count and increment it for each use: 0000, 0001, etc.
I'm looking to create a simple short-lived reservation system, and I'd like to generate confirmation numbers that are
unique
random-looking
alphanumeric
short-ish, at least much shorter than 32 character-long strings returned by sha1
I'm only looking to have ~500 reservations, so I don't imagine high likelyhood of collissions.
One idea I had is generate an sha1 hash based on a date-time stamp and username, then truncating it to its first 10 characters. Would something like that be reliably unique enough for the purposes of processing ~500 reservations?
There should be no difference in the randomness of any given bit of a SHA-1 hash, so that's possible. Another way would be to fold the hash into itself using XOR until you have 60 bits worth of data, then encode it using Base 64 to get a mostly alpha-numeric result.
This is only necessary if you want to be able to generate the same Id repeatedly for the same input data. Otherwise, if a random id that you generate once, and hold onto after that, use Anders' suggestion. If you get a conflict, just generate another one.
You can use whatever, even a plain random number generator; however, you should check that the reservation code isn't already present. If this is the case, add characters ('x') to the string (date+user) until you get a new random/sha1/etc.
I'm only looking to have ~500 reservations, so I don't imagine high likelyhood of collissions.
Another stupid idea: generate 1000 or 2000 unique random numbers with the desired properties, store them somewhere, and assign them to the users as they register :)
Here's one way to do it in Perl:
sub get_random_name()
{
my #chars=('a'..'z','A'..'Z');
my $random_string;
foreach (1..22)
{
# rand #chars will generate a random
# number between 0 and scalar #chars
$random_string .= $chars[rand #chars];
}
return $random_string . "-" . time();
}
I don't remember how long the time() part is, so you may have to adjust the numbers to fit your length. You can also remove that part if you don't need it.
If it's really just 500, then pre-generate 20,000 of them, into a table, then get the "next unused one" when you need it.
Some good tips on this question: How do I create a random alpha-numeric string in C++?
I'd avoid including characters like "1", "l", and "O", "0" and "5", "S", and "Z", "2" in your string, to make it easier for customers when they need to read your reservation code over the phone. The algorithm presented at that link should help you do this.
use a guid? 16 characters, though if you really don't care about collision, you could just choose the first n characters.
In C# you can use http://www.dotnetfunda.com/forums/thread1357-how-do-generate-unique-alpha-numeric-random-number-in-aspnet.aspx (the super easy way, they say)